


Heartache Serenade

by vaingloriousactor



Category: Assassins - Sondheim/Weidman
Genre: Assassination, F/M, Gen, Kind of shippy, M/M, Mentions of Death, Mentions of Sex, Pining, hello i'm going to hell, mentions of abuse, more complicated than that, or sexual content at the very least, yeah i get it this sucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 02:04:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14661087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vaingloriousactor/pseuds/vaingloriousactor
Summary: The Proprietor comes to terms with who the Balladeer has become and what his life is now.





	Heartache Serenade

**Author's Note:**

> Hey! It's me with another Assassins fic! Shockingly, I understand the connotations of this. Don't like it don't read it. I do not condone assassination and my apologies go to any of the people mentioned here who have children in my general age bracket who read fic on ao3. But also why are you reading fic about your grand parents.

The Proprietor gets wind of who the Balladeer is going to become before anyone else. It comes to him in a vision and while he wishes to bask in, relish another American Dream shot down, this time from six stories up, he can’t. Not entirely. Time has no meaning so he tracks down the hazy faces of the young American traitor’s life and he tries each of them on, staring at his reflection in the fun house mirrors. He watched his body morph into the female form, with thick, fierce brows and pursed lips.

_So this is what he’s going to fall in love with._

He spins and watches the dress billow slightly, how blossoms fall, the Balladeer would have said.

“What are you wearing?” The Balladeer’s voice takes him by surprise and, still as the woman, _Marina_ , he turns and blinks, cursing himself internally. The Balladeer feels his stomach knot up and he doesn’t know why, he can’t put his finger on the rush of attraction, of tension, a sexually charged deja vu. He had never seen the Proprietor in a female form without smeared clown makeup, but his bare features draw him in, enchant him. He steps forward quickly and embraces the Proprietor, mouth to mouth. They fuck like that and the Proprietor thinks to himself the entire time _This is how it will be._ The Proprietor still wears the form of a woman he isn’t even sure is born yet when they fall asleep and when they wake up.

“So you like this?” He asks and it’s the first time he’s spoken and his voice is heavily accented and the Balladeer only laughs, wrapping his arms around the demon’s waist.

“What was that?”

The Proprietor doesn’t know whether to make a joke about Gorbachev or Khrushchev or Putin because time remains irrelevant, moving all around without direction with the exception of one chunk of time. There are twenty four years that time is linear.  The Proprietor knows why but he doesn’t know _why_.

The Proprietor feels numb when the Balladeer disappears and he doesn’t want to admit to it. He’s a demon. An agent of chaos and destruction. All of this is his creation, his doing, his will. He led an army of assassins to wage a war on earth, a disastrous repeat of the celestial battles he didn’t even exist for. He didn’t manifest with the colonial discovery of America, but he gained proper consciousness then. If that’s what it could be called. He was never sure. He remembers stumbling into a family home twenty years too early, planting the seeds of assassination in the wrong Booth though killing Jackson would’ve done plenty of good anyway. He was more careful after that, letting Booth handle the logistics of time and place. He was better at that than the Proprietor.

When Lee is born, the Proprietor is there, in the waiting room unseen to everyone. He’s alive. He’s born. He’s healthy. And when he’s born with brown eyes instead of blue, the Proprietor knows he’s not the Balladeer but that doesn’t stop him from hoping. When he returns to the carnival, time is upside down again, but for all they know, two decades on earth could feel like an hour at the carnival, a year going by as quickly as a turn on the ferris wheel.

“You!” He calls out to Booth who was reading the same two editions of The Theatre, he had read dozens of times with paintings of a woman in gold on the cover and a man in a heavy wig on the other, reading and re-reading testimonials of his brother. One read “From an intimate of Edwin Booth of over twenty years,” and the Proprietor can see the actor’s lip curl up.

“Me?” Booth looks up, arching his brows, the ghost of a smile sneaking across his face.

“I want to prepare you for Oswald.”

“You already have. Have some faith in my abilities. It’s worked up until this point.” He closes the magazine.

“But this time is different.”

“We killed the Balladeer. I highly suggest you stop missing him. Come back to me when you want me to go up.”

The Proprietor is hurt. If anyone was his confidant there it was Booth. He called him “chief” or “our pioneer.” He had kissed him and given him the worship only a fan could offer that the actor craved so desperately.

 

***

 

The Proprietor drops a dog in the yard and he hopes. He watches, invisible, with Booth rolling his eyes beside him, equally unseen.

“New Orleans is filthy.” Booth says, looking around. “And so mixed.” The Proprietor shushes him as a dark haired little boy scoops up the puppy and runs to a woman with a vacant stare as the pair slink back to limbo, neither paying attention to the dumpy young man who is there in limbo but not even born on earth. Maybe. Booth isn’t sure.

“Did you give him Tex? That’s the dog’s name. Tex.”

Booth nods and the Proprietor strolls ahead, back to the house of mirrors and he tries on Marina’s form and closes his eyes.

***

 

The Proprietor blends into the crowd in Belarus and he knows where to find the couple. They’re young, far too young, and he tries to tell himself they’re tender. He sees the dark haired woman who stared back at him from the funny mirrors and he lets himself slip into her soul. He tells himself he is neither the first or last demon to possess a pretty young woman, and when he sees the dark flash in the eyes of the man who is not the Balladeer, he becomes intimately aware that he is not the first to take control over her.

“ _Lyubov moya_ ,” the Proprietor says with Marina’s mouth and voice and reaches out to stroke the muscular shoulders of the American. Of Lee. That’s who he is now. He has a name.  He is surprised when Lee smiles back and, somewhere in the back of this temporarily shared head, Marina is too.

“Look at you being affectionate.” Lee almost sneers.

“Lee.” He sounds the name out, tries it on.

“I thought you didn’t like calling me that?”

“Alek.” Marina corrects for the Proprietor. He’s surprised she gave him the reins so easily.

 _Am I going mad?_ The woman’s voice asks him in Russian and he understands.

_No. I’m helping you._

_Is this because I’m pregnant?_

Pregnant. The word made Proprietor recoil with envy. Somewhere, somehow, this was still the Balladeer.

_Shit._

“What?” His face is suddenly teasing, playful, and the Proprietor sees the Balladeer’s smile and he wants to cry tears of relief. He presses his lips to the lips he pretended were the ones he used to kiss.

_What are you doing? What am I doing? I don’t know who you are, what you are. What is going on?_

“Let’s go home.”

_Let me have this, Marina. Please. You don’t know what I know._

He stays in her body the whole night, trying desperately to connect with the man who used to be the Balladeer. But then Lee chokes Marina all too suddenly the Proprietor understands. He goes back to limbo.

 

***

 

“He’s beautiful.” Booth comments, leaning against the bar and throwing back the cocktail the Proprietor mixed for him. “It’s not strong enough.”

The Proprietor rolls his eyes and makes another cocktail, sliding it to Booth, who spins his cane in one hand.

“No he’s not.”

“I don’t believe you understand how mortal, human attraction works. He’s beautiful. What I’d give to do to him what you did when you were that woman. One day perhaps. Clearly all will go according to plan. Until then I wait.”

The Proprietor returns midway through a fight he doesn’t understand and he brings Booth with him, the two of them listening at the door.

“It’s too early to tell him.” He tells Booth who rolls his eyes and adjusts his suit.

“When do you expect me to tell him? How else are we going to get him to the States?”

“You don’t have to worry about getting him to America. He’s already planned that.”

“Oh, so I’m simply here for emotional support? Forgive me, I thought you colder than that. And truly, I thought you _liked_ me more than that too.”

 

***

 

When Lee arrives, when Booth alone cannot persuade him to join the crew but the entire menagerie can, Booth all too eagerly keeps him to himself. And Lee enjoys the attention. The pretty, dumb actor pleasures him ( _more than Maina ever did_ he thinks to himself) and Lee feels purpose. The Proprietor hears them. Really, he hears Booth and one night when he leaves Lee dozing in bed and steps outside to smoke, the Proprietor pulls him aside and sighs.

“Are you doing this to spite me?”

“Doing what?”

“Fucking Lee?”

Booth snorts a laugh. “I’m hardly fucking Lee to spite you. I’m fucking Lee because I’ve been eyeing him since you started dragging me on your spying quests and, quite frankly, you haven’t been paying me much mind.” He pauses. “And for the record, _he’s_ fucking _me_.”

“Well that’s hardly a surprise.” The Proprietor means it as a jab but, instead, he almost smiles when he says it. Booth puts the cigarette out on the dusty ground.

“So now you’ve really gotten a taste for what it’s like for all of us. Those of us who lost folks, who had to deal with being lost,ourselves. Ain’t easy is it?”

The Proprietor lets him go back to Lee and he goes to the mortal realm to find Marina. He looks unsuspecting enough but when he knocks she barely opens the door anyway.

“No seeing journalists.”

“I’m not a journalist.”

“No cops then!” She slams the door and he clears his throat.

“I’m a new neighbor, Miss. I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Johnny.” He smirks at his choice of name.

The door opens again and the woman stands, eyeing him suspiciously.

“You knock because you know of my husband and you want to see what’s become of us.”

He’s taken aback.

“No. I simply wanted to be neighborly.” She eyes him suspiciously but lets him in. She brews tea but never takes her eyes away.

“Why move here?” She says as she hands him a mug. “Cops everywhere. Reporters everywhere. Everyone want interview. I tell them I give no interview but maybe I sell you item.” She laughs and he chuckles awkwardly at the half joke. “Don’t play dumb. My husband, he played dumb. Look where that got him. Dumbass. Are you married? Waste of time.”

He shakes his head.

“Smart man. Three years lost. And now my daughters have no father because their father was idiot.” The Proprietor still cups his mug and listens to her.

 _She’s so young._ He hadn’t before realized how young she was, when he was so intent on trying to bring back the Balladeer. He finishes his tea and he appears the next day with a cake of gratitude and dolls for the girls.

He arrives and arrives and arrives, seemingly unchanging and Marina gets old. He’s grateful she’s old and her girls are grown. No time has passed in limbo it seems and for the first time, the demon is acutely aware of mortality.

“When my first husband and I were first wed, he wasn’t the nicest man.” She confesses to him one time. “There was voice. Something took hold of me and got me through those nights. But that is the past. Too long ago to think about now.”

She takes his hands as he leaves and she smiles and whispers,“Thank you for all you have done these years.”

He leaves her to old age.

  
***

 

At a certain point, Lee becomes accustomed enough to Booth that he would much rather beat him than sleep peacefully in his bed.

“You tried that and it didn't work,” Booth had told Lee when he insisted he'd rather beat his wife than shoot the president. Taunted by his own words, Booth drags himself to the Proprietor with a black eye and a busted lip, tail between his legs.

“I couldn't get a hit in,” Booth averts his gaze. This was not a fight in a bar or even the ghost of a childhood memory of tackling another boy to the ground who had teased Edwin. His father had not been a frequently affectionate man to begin with, but he wasn't excessively cruel either but just the same, Wilkes remembers seeing his father spank his brother hard for using one of his costumes in a boyhood play. And still, as he leans heavily on his cane, he thinks this is different still.

The Proprietor may be a demon, but he has too much heart to be an effective one and he is all too aware he cares for Booth too much to let him hover in front or him in pain. He gives Booth a cool towel, although it's stained with both grease and clown makeup. Booth doesn't mind.

“C’mon Chief. Stay in here. It'll be like the old days.” Booth suspects the Proprietor wants to add “fuck him,” but he doesn't and Booth offers a smile of gratitude. He lies in the bed in the small circus tent and he's grateful that the Proprietor carved out time for his prisoners to sleep. Once Booth begins to drift off, the Proprietor heals the cuts and bruises. He thinks about Marina again and how her eyes stared back at him in the reflection of the fun house mirrors but all too suddenly he imagines it’s Booth staring back at him instead, Booth who had been so eager to be loved again. _Poor Johnny._

“In a weird way,” Booth murmurs at length, “I miss the Balladeer too. He reminds me of my brother I think. Always prepared to remind me of my flaws. I miss my brother too.” He doesn't say anything else. The Proprietor wraps his arm tighter. _We’ll figure something out_. The Proprietor takes his own comfort in being a “we” with Booth again. At least there's that.


End file.
